As you’re enjoying 70 and sun later today, consider …

That you could be living in a “winter wonderland.” This video from Portland, Ore., which shows cars sliding helplessly downhill, is one of the most surreal things I’ve ever watched. I cringed with every crunch.

While this doesn’t have much to do with science, it is a nice reminder for all of us in southeast Texas that there’s some benefit to putting up with oppressive summers. So, what are you going to do outside today?

I just have to say that that video, which is from last year, is an indication of how lame Portland becomes when it snows, not indicative that we get a lot of snow. It snows so infrequently here that the city and its residents are utterly unprepared. After living in NYC for 25 years and coping just fine with anything from 8 inches to 8 feet of snowfall, I still get a chuckle over how this city collapses in two inches of snow.

As you have implored us often in the past Eric, Stay on Topic. Well I can see your fascination with this video though. Like one poster said our lack of hills, except for the interstate overpasses, would make this harder to happen here even with similar weather conditions but if you are involved not much fun. But Charliez don’t look now, the northerners are already here. I’m one of them and I bet I know how to drive or slide better on this kind of stuff than you do. Expierence.

I’m a Civil War reenactor, among other things. Today I am going to clean my muskets. Tomorrow I may smoke some meat outside. Well, obviously outside. I’d like to haul some rocks out to my pond dams but it’s probably still too muddy and I’d get stuck.

I’ve been in snowstorms where the cars did that without anybody in them!

But in a visit to upper Michigan a few blizzards ago, some local yokel who came to the airport in Grand Rapids to give me a ride to a conference drove too fast on the ice, and about halfway out into the northern Michigan boondocks he ran us clean off the road.

We flew down a hillside, annihilated a snow drift and spun round and round, like a drunken figure skater, out to the center of a frozen lake.

At first I thought we were gonna be ice cubes for sure, fish food for the spring thaw!

But as it turned out, the lake was frozen three or four feet thick, and it supported the weight of his four-door Detroit gas hog without even giving up a snap, crackle or pop!

A group of beer-swilling ice fishermen who found it all quite amusing took pity on us, and gave us a tow back to the main road with a snow plow.

We had an ice storm in Dallas once that caused ice to build up several inches thick on the roads. The engine vibration of cars sitting at lights would cause them to break loose and slide off the road into the ditches. None of the roads were sanded. It was bad.

Those are obviously drivers who obviously don’t know how to drive on snow. Probably because Portland gets more cold rain than snow and ice. I spent a few years in Minnesota, and drivers there wouldn’t be doing that badly.

Michael G: “Jamming your brakes while sliding on the ice is the worst thing you can do.”

If your car has ABS, jamming on your brakes and holding them down is exactly what you need to do. ABS will stop you in a straight line unless you’ve broken traction, then you want to steer into the slide to regain steering control and then stomp on and hold your brakes again.

Someone: “Those are obviously drivers who obviously don’t know how to drive on snow.”

That isn’t snow, it is ice and there is a big difference. In fact this may be black ice.

“I spent a few years in Minnesota, and drivers there wouldn’t be doing that badly.”

That is only true if the roads have been sanded and salted. If not, only fools intentionally drive on ice. However, in the video, this looks like black ice which you can’t see, but you know when you are on it as all the drivers in the video learned.

I laugh whenever I hear people from up North say that “people down here don’t know how to drive on ice.” NO ONE knows how to drive on ice. You basically become an out of control hockey puck. The truth is just about ANYONE is capable of driving on roads during a major ice and snow event -IF the roads have been cleared and treated, which is typically the case in metro areas up north and NOT the case down in the south. And that northerner in a 4X4 on the elevated ramp of the Sam Houston Tollway during a major ice event (January 1997)? Well, the truth is they are just as helpless and incapable of driving on glare ice as the southerner in the same vehicle.

“After living in NYC for 25 years and coping just fine with anything from 8 inches to 8 feet of snowfall, I still get a chuckle over how this city collapses in two inches of snow.”

Posted by: Michael M.

Yeah, and when was the last time that happened? A generation ago? I get a good chuckle when I see ex New Yorkers trying to drive through sand at the beach. They get stuck every time. The they complain about how “hot it is” while they’re trying to dig it out…usually unsucessfully.

Haven’t those Portlanders heard of salt? They bring in mountains of the stuff around here every winter. You’ve surely heard the motto “Move to Buffalo and watch your car rot.” Not to mention the infrastructure.

Still, I lived in the south for three years, happily moved back north and have never regreted the decision (except this time of year when you evil southerners are playing baseball and I’m blowing snow out of the driveway).